Now I guess we just need to work on diversity of race, as well as everything else. The juxtaposition of the comments about diversity and focusing on just sexism stood out to me.
We really do. We should think about doing outreach to groups like LiC, maybe. I know we haven't done any explicit outreach looking for developers before, but that's because the nature of the project and the people running it automatically brought in women, people with disabilities, queer people, and people from a wide variety of English-speaking countries (which is a limited but very real diversity). If we want more diversity of race than we have, I think some outreach would not be a bad idea. Of course, you can't really do outreach until somebody has the time to follow up with actual mentoring...
Our racial diversity is not utterly appalling. It's just not very good.
the nature of the project and the people running it automatically brought in [...] people from a wide variety of English-speaking countries
I know of at least 1 English speaker (besides me) from a country where English isn't (AFAIK) an official/mainstream language or one commonly learned in early childhood, but I'm not sure what the overall proportion is, so I can't say whether it should be English-speaking countries, as you wrote, or fluent English speakers. That said, it's true that English is the Dreamwidth working language, and (at least) moderate fluency in English is required both to contribute and socialize effectively with other contributors. I'm not sure that could be changed, though. Maybe it's an inherent limit? (Not just for OSS projects - I can't picture any collaborative project not needing a common working language.)
I can definitely think of a few people who are from countries where English is not the primary language. It is true that any project needs a common language, and I think the fact that those of us from English-speaking countries are primarily and depressingly the most monolingual people in the world means that English tend to default towards the common language.
It always made me sad that there wasn't really a good method of interaction between the Russian-speaking and English-speaking chunks of LiveJournal users, and I say that entirely as an LJ user and not in any way in response to the Russophobia conversation. I suppose until there is better automatic translation we are just stuck.
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juliet!)
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Now I guess we just need to work on diversity of race, as well as everything else. The juxtaposition of the comments about diversity and focusing on just sexism stood out to me.
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Our racial diversity is not utterly appalling. It's just not very good.
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It always made me sad that there wasn't really a good method of interaction between the Russian-speaking and English-speaking chunks of LiveJournal users, and I say that entirely as an LJ user and not in any way in response to the Russophobia conversation. I suppose until there is better automatic translation we are just stuck.
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YAY!